Quote:

I think I gave you a decent reply about why. I certainly don't appreciate these slights against my character nor the intimation that you require "proof!" as a response to my initial post on the subject.

I am being as helpful as I can in my role, you started out just being disrespectful.

~

Let's go over it again.

The solder pads are connected. They're connected exactly as it would need to be to fit 4 chips to support 512MB. However the components etc. on the board supports 2 chips at 128MB total.

The board can be modified to support 512MB - it was designed so that no *PCB* changes had to be made and therefore minimal recertification costs - and based on a certain number of 1Gbit chips which were prohibitively expensive at the time of design and/or not generally available, and it's possible PROBABLY to fit two 2Gbit chips to use the same solder pads at the top (which make the underside ones totally irrelevant) however this is something that needs to be done in production.

Let's take an example; you might look at motherboards in the PC world which have solder pads for a second DIMM slot, but you cannot just solder in a new DIMM slot. Manufacturers save costs by not populating the components required to support the slot.

It's not possible to simply "mod" the Efika to support it. Subtle things may be missing.. missing them out may damage the hardware and your new memory chips. We simply do not recommend it because it is far more work than it is worth for you personally and for us as a company, not only that but down to minimum orders of memory chips and lead times.

As for the firmware - it needs to configure the SDRAM controller to the right settings on boot; this relies on intimate knowledge of which RAM is on board. It also requires knowledge of the configuration of that RAM (which chip is where and how many and what size). This also needs to be solved in pre-production - the RAM must be validated to work, the right settings used and tested vigorously to ensure proper operation. It's possible some RAM will not work reliably on the MPC5200B in the configuration it needs to be. It certainly will be much, much lower performance due to the restricted bus width (it drops down to 16-bit in the 4-chip configuration supported on the board, from 32-bit with just the two chips).

Therefore if you want a 512MB Efika, you need to order 1000 of them to make it worth our while, wait a long time, and have to be prepared for it not to be as fast.

[ Edited by Neko on 2008/12/5 17:29 ]